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arcticdementor · 3 years

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Oscar Wilde supposedly said George Bernard Shaw "has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends". Socialist blogger Freddie DeBoer is the opposite: few allies, but deeply respected by his enemies. I disagree with him about everything, so naturally I am a big fan of his work - which meant I was happy to read his latest book, The Cult Of Smart.

DeBoer starts with the standard narrative of The Failing State Of American Education. Students aren't learning. The country is falling behind. Only tough no-excuses policies, standardization, and innovative reforms like charter schools can save it, as shown by their stellar performance improving test scores and graduation rates.

He argues that every word of it is a lie. American education isn't getting worse by absolute standards: students match or outperform their peers from 20 or 50 years ago. It's not getting worse by international standards: America's PISA rankings are mediocre, but the country has always scored near the bottom of international rankings, even back in the 50s and 60s when we were kicking Soviet ass and landing men on the moon. Race and gender gaps are stable or decreasing. American education is doing much as it's always done - about as well as possible, given the crushing poverty, single parent-families, violence, and racism holding back the kids it's charged with shepherding to adulthood.

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For decades, politicians of both parties have thought of education as "the great leveller" and the key to solving poverty. If people are stuck in boring McJobs, it's because they're not well-educated enough to be surgeons and rocket scientists. Give them the education they need, and they can join the knowledge economy and rise into the upper-middle class. For lack of any better politically-palatable way to solve poverty, this has kind of become a totem: get better schools, and all those unemployed Appalachian coal miners can move to Silicon Valley and start tech companies. But you can't do that. Not everyone is intellectually capable of doing a high-paying knowledge economy job. Schools can change your intellectual potential a limited amount. Ending child hunger, removing lead from the environment, and similar humanitarian programs can do a little more, but only a little. In the end, a lot of people aren't going to make it.

So what can you do? DeBoer doesn't think there's an answer within the existing system. Instead, we need to dismantle meritocracy.

DeBoer is skeptical of "equality of opportunity". Even if you solve racism, sexism, poverty, and many other things that DeBoer repeatedly reminds us have not been solved, you'll just get people succeeding or failing based on natural talent. DeBoer agrees conservatives can be satisfied with this, but thinks leftists shouldn't be. Natural talent is just as unearned as class, race, or any other unfair advantage.

One one level, the titular Cult Of Smart is just the belief that enough education can solve any problem. But more fundamentally it's also the troubling belief that after we jettison unfair theories of superiority based on skin color, sex, and whatever else, we're finally left with what really determines your value as a human being - how smart you are. DeBoer recalls hearing an immigrant mother proudly describe her older kid's achievements in math, science, etc, "and then her younger son ran by, and she said, offhand, 'This one, he is maybe not so smart.'" DeBoer was originally shocked to hear someone describe her own son that way, then realized that he wouldn't have thought twice if she'd dismissed him as unathletic, or bad at music. Intelligence is considered such a basic measure of human worth that to dismiss someone as unintelligent seems like consigning them into the outer darkness. So DeBoer describes how early readers of his book were scandalized by the insistence on genetic differences in intelligence - isn't this denying the equality of Man, declaring some people inherently superior to others? Only if you conflate intelligence with worth, which DeBoer argues our society does constantly. It starts with parents buying Baby Einstein tapes and trying to send their kids to the best preschool, continues through the "meat grinder" of the college admissions process when everyone knows that whoever gets into Harvard is better than whoever gets into State U, and continues when the meritocracy rewards the straight-A Harvard student with a high-paying powerful job and the high school dropout with drudgery or unemployment. Even the phrase "high school dropout" has an aura of personal failure about it, in a way totally absent from "kid who always lost at Little League".

DeBoer isn't convinced this is an honest mistake. He draws attention to a sort of meta-class-war - a war among class warriors over whether the true enemy is the top 1% (this is the majority position) or the top 20% (this is DeBoer's position; if you've read Staying Classy, you'll immediately recognize this disagreement as the same one that divided the Church and UR models of class). The 1% are the Buffetts and Bezoses of the world; the 20% are the "managerial" class of well-off urban professionals, bureaucrats, creative types, and other mandarins. Opposition to the 20% is usually right-coded; describe them as "woke coastal elites who dominate academia and the media", and the Trump campaign ad almost writes itself. But some Marxists flirt with it too; the book references Elizabeth Currid-Halkett's Theory Of The Aspirational Class, and you can hear echoes of this every time Twitter socialists criticize "Vox liberals" or something. Access to the 20% is gated by college degree, and their legitimizing myth is that their education makes them more qualified and humane than the rest of us. DeBoer thinks the deification of school-achievement-compatible intelligence as highest good serves their class interest; "equality of opportunity" means we should ignore all other human distinctions in favor of the one that our ruling class happens to excel at.

So maybe equality of opportunity is a stupid goal. DeBoer argues for equality of results. This is a pretty extreme demand, but he's a Marxist and he means what he says. He wants a world where smart people and dull people have equally comfortable lives, and where intelligence can take its rightful place as one of many virtues which are nice to have but not the sole measure of your worth.

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I'm Freddie's ideological enemy, which means I have to respect him. And there's a lot to like about this book. I think its two major theses - that intelligence is mostly innate, and that this is incompatible with equating it to human value - are true, important, and poorly appreciated by the general population. I tried to make a somewhat similar argument in my Parable Of The Talents, which DeBoer graciously quotes in his introduction. Some of the book's peripheral theses - that a lot of education science is based on fraud, that US schools are not declining in quality, etc - are also true, fascinating, and worth spreading. Overall, I think this book does more good than harm.

It's also rambling, self-contradictory in places, and contains a lot of arguments I think are misguided or bizarre.

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At the time, I noted that meritocracy has nothing to do with this. The intuition behind meritocracy is: if your life depends on a difficult surgery, would you prefer the hospital hire a surgeon who aced medical school, or a surgeon who had to complete remedial training to barely scrape by with a C-? If you prefer the former, you’re a meritocrat with respect to surgeons. Generalize a little, and you have the argument for being a meritocrat everywhere else.

The above does away with any notions of "desert", but I worry it's still accepting too many of DeBoer's assumptions. A better description might be: Your life depends on a difficult surgery. You can hire whatever surgeon you want to perform it. You are willing to pay more money for a surgeon who aced medical school than for a surgeon who failed it. So higher intelligence leads to more money.

This not only does away with "desert", but also with reified Society deciding who should prosper. More meritorious surgeons get richer not because "Society" has selected them to get rich as a reward for virtue, but because individuals pursuing their incentives prefer, all else equal, not to die of botched surgeries. Meritocracy isn't an -ocracy like democracy or autocracy, where people in wigs sit down to frame a constitution and decide how things should work. It's a dubious abstraction over the fact that people prefer to have jobs done well rather than poorly, and use their financial and social clout to make this happen.

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I think DeBoer would argue he's not against improving schools. He just thinks all attempts to do it so far have been crooks and liars pillaging the commons, so much so that we need a moratorium on this kind of thing until we can figure out what's going on. But I'm worried that his arguments against existing school reform are in some cases kind of weak.

DeBoer does make things hard for himself by focusing on two of the most successful charter school experiments. If he'd been a little less honest, he could have passed over these and instead mentioned the many charter schools that fail, or just sort of plod onward doing about as well as public schools do. I think the closest thing to a consensus right now is that most charter schools do about the same as public schools for white/advantaged students, and slightly better than public schools for minority/disadvantaged students. But DeBoer very virtuously thinks it's important to confront his opponents' strongest cases, so these are the ones I'll focus on here.

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These are good points, and I would accept them from anyone other than DeBoer, who will go on to say in a few chapters that the solution to our education issues is a Marxist revolution that overthrows capitalism and dispenses with the very concept of economic value. If he's willing to accept a massive overhaul of everything, that's failed every time it's tried, why not accept a much smaller overhaul-of-everything, that's succeeded at least once? There are plenty of billionaires willing to pour fortunes into reforming various cities - DeBoer will go on to criticize them as deluded do-gooders a few chapters later. If billions of dollars plus a serious commitment to ground-up reform are what we need, let's just spend billions of dollars and have a serious commitment to ground-up reform! If more hurricanes is what it takes to fix education, I'm willing to do my part by leaving my air conditioner on 'high' all the time.

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DeBoer spends several impassioned sections explaining how opposed he is to scientific racism, and arguing that the belief that individual-level IQ differences are partly genetic doesn't imply a belief that group-level IQ differences are partly genetic. Some reviewers of this book are still suspicious, wondering if he might be hiding his real position. I can assure you he is not. Seriously, he talks about how much he hates belief in genetic group-level IQ differences about thirty times per page. Also, sometimes when I write posts about race, he sends me angry emails ranting about how much he hates that some people believe in genetic group-level IQ differences - totally private emails nobody else will ever see. I have no reason to doubt that his hatred of this is as deep as he claims.

But I understand why some reviewers aren't convinced. This book can't stop tripping over itself when it tries to discuss these topics. DeBoer grants X, he grants X -> Y, then goes on ten-page rants about how absolutely loathsome and abominable anyone who believes Y is.

Remember, one of the theses of this book is that individual differences in intelligence are mostly genetic. But DeBoer spends only a little time citing the studies that prove this is true. He (correctly) decides that most of his readers will object not on the scientific ground that they haven't seen enough studies, but on the moral ground that this seems to challenge the basic equality of humankind. He (correctly) points out that this is balderdash, that innate differences in intelligence don't imply differences in moral value, any more than innate differences in height or athletic ability or anything like that imply differences in moral value. His goal is not just to convince you about the science, but to convince you that you can believe the science and still be an okay person who respects everyone and wants them to be happy.

He could have written a chapter about race that reinforced this message. He could have reviewed studies about whether racial differences in intelligence are genetic or environmental, come to some conclusion or not, but emphasized that it doesn't matter, and even if it's 100% genetic it has no bearing at all on the need for racial equality and racial justice, that one race having a slightly higher IQ than another doesn't make them "superior" any more than Pygmies' genetic short stature makes them "inferior".

Instead he - well, I'm not really sure what he's doing. He starts by says racial differences must be environmental. Then he says that studies have shown that racial IQ gaps are not due to differences in income/poverty, because the gaps remain even after controlling for these. But, he says, there could be other environmental factors aside from poverty that cause racial IQ gaps. After tossing out some possibilities, he concludes that he doesn't really need to be able to identify a plausible mechanism, because "white supremacy touches on so many aspects of American life that it's irresponsible to believe we have adequately controlled for it", no matter how many studies we do or how many confounders we eliminate. His argument, as far as I can tell, is that it's always possible that racial IQ differences are environmental, therefore they must be environmental. Then he goes on to, at great length, denounce as loathsome and villainous anyone who might suspect these gaps of being genetic. Such people are "noxious", "bigoted", "ugly", "pseudoscientific" "bad people" who peddle "propaganda" to "advance their racist and sexist agenda". (But tell us what you really think!)

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This is far enough from my field that I would usually defer to expert consensus, but all the studies I can find which try to assess expert consensus seem crazy. A while ago, I freaked out upon finding a study that seemed to show most expert scientists in the field agreed with Murray's thesis in 1987 - about three times as many said the gap was due to a combination of genetics and environment as said it was just environment. Then I freaked out again when I found another study (here is the most recent version, from 2020) showing basically the same thing (about four times as many say it’s a combination of genetics and environment compared to just environment). I can't find any expert surveys giving the expected result that they all agree this is dumb and definitely 100% environment and we can move on (I'd be very relieved if anybody could find those, or if they could explain why the ones I found were fake studies or fake experts or a biased sample, or explain how I'm misreading them or that they otherwise shouldn't be trusted. If you have thoughts on this, please send me an email). I've vacillated back and forth on how to think about this question so many times, and right now my personal probability estimate is "I am still freaking out about this, go away go away go away". And I understand I have at least two potentially irresolveable biases on this question: one, I'm a white person in a country with a long history of promoting white supremacy; and two, if I lean in favor then everyone will hate me, and use it as a bludgeon against anyone I have ever associated with, and I will die alone in a ditch and maybe deserve it. So the best I can do is try to route around this issue when considering important questions. This is sometimes hard, but the basic principle is that I'm far less sure of any of it than I am sure that all human beings are morally equal and deserve to have a good life and get treated with respect regardless of academic achievement.

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That last sentence about the basic principle is the thesis of The Cult Of Smart, so it would have been a reasonable position for DeBoer to take too. DeBoer doesn't take it. He acknowledges the existence of expert scientists who believe the differences are genetic (he names Linda Gottfredson in particular), but only to condemn them as morally flawed for asserting this.

But this is exactly the worldview he is, at this very moment, trying to write a book arguing against! His thesis is that mainstream voices say there can't be genetic differences in intelligence among individuals, because that would make some people fundamentally inferior to others, which is morally repugnant - but those voices are wrong, because differences in intelligence don't affect moral equality. Then he adds that mainstream voices say there can't be genetic differences in intelligence among ethnic groups, because that would make some groups fundamentally inferior to others, which is morally repugnant - and those voices are right; we must deny the differences lest we accept the morally repugnant thing.

Normally I would cut DeBoer some slack and assume this was some kind of Straussian manuever he needed to do to get the book published, or to prevent giving ammunition to bad people. But no, he has definitely believed this for years, consistently, even while being willing to offend basically anybody about basically anything else at any time. So I'm convinced this is his true belief. I'm just not sure how he squares it with the rest of his book.

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"Smart" equivocates over two concepts - high-IQ and successful-at-formal-education. These concepts are related; in general, high-IQ people get better grades, graduate from better colleges, etc. But they're not exactly the same.

There is a cult of successful-at-formal-education. Society obsesses over how important formal education is, how it can do anything, how it's going to save the world. If you get gold stars on your homework, become the teacher's pet, earn good grades in high school, and get into an Ivy League, the world will love you for it.

But the opposite is true of high-IQ. Society obsessively denies that IQ can possibly matter. Admit to being a member of Mensa, and you'll get a fusillade of "IQ is just a number!" and "people who care about their IQ are just overcompensating for never succeeding at anything real!" and "IQ doesn't matter, what about emotional IQ or grit or whatever else, huh? Bet you didn't think of that!" Science writers and Psychology Today columnists vomit out a steady stream of bizarre attempts to deny the statistical validity of IQ.

These are two sides of the same phenomenon. Some people are smarter than others as adults, and the more you deny innate ability, the more weight you have to put on education. Society wants to put a lot of weight on formal education, and compensates by denying innate ability a lot. DeBoer is aware of this and his book argues against it adeptly.

Still, I worry that the title - The Cult Of Smart - might lead people to think there is a cult surrounding intelligence, when exactly the opposite is true. But I guess The Cult Of Successful At Formal Education sounds less snappy, so whatever.

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I try to review books in an unbiased way, without letting myself succumb to fits of emotion. So be warned: I'm going to fail with this one. I am going to get angry and write whole sentences in capital letters. This is one of the most enraging passages I've ever read.

School is child prison. It's forcing kids to spend their childhood - a happy time! a time of natural curiosity and exploration and wonder - sitting in un-air-conditioned blocky buildings, cramped into identical desks, listening to someone drone on about the difference between alliteration and assonance, desperate to even be able to fidget but knowing that if they do their teacher will yell at them, and maybe they'll get a detention that extends their sentence even longer without parole. The anti-psychiatric-abuse community has invented the "Burrito Test" - if a place won't let you microwave a burrito without asking permission, it's an institution. Doesn't matter if the name is "Center For Flourishing" or whatever and the aides are social workers in street clothes instead of nurses in scrubs - if it doesn't pass the Burrito Test, it's an institution. There is no way school will let you microwave a burrito without permission. THEY WILL NOT EVEN LET YOU GO TO THE BATHROOM WITHOUT PERMISSION. YOU HAVE TO RAISE YOUR HAND AND ASK YOUR TEACHER FOR SOMETHING CALLED "THE BATHROOM PASS" IN FRONT OF YOUR ENTIRE CLASS, AND IF SHE DOESN'T LIKE YOU, SHE CAN JUST SAY NO.

I don't like actual prisons, the ones for criminals, but I will say this for them - people keep them around because they honestly believe they prevent crime. If someone found proof-positive that prisons didn't prevent any crimes at all, but still suggested that we should keep sending people there, because it means we'd have "fewer middle-aged people on the streets" and "fewer adults forced to go home to empty apartments and houses", then MAYBE YOU WOULD START TO UNDERSTAND HOW I FEEL ABOUT SENDING PEOPLE TO SCHOOL FOR THE SAME REASON.

I sometimes sit in on child psychiatrists' case conferences, and I want to scream at them. There's the kid who locks herself in the bathroom every morning so her parents can't drag her to child prison, and her parents stand outside the bathroom door to yell at her for hours until she finally gives in and goes, and everyone is trying to medicate her or figure out how to remove the bathroom locks, and THEY ARE SOLVING THE WRONG PROBLEM. There are all the kids who had bedwetting or awful depression or constant panic attacks, and then as soon as the coronavirus caused the child prisons to shut down the kids mysteriously became instantly better. I have heard stories of kids bullied to the point where it would be unfair not to call it torture, and the child prisons respond according to Procedures which look very good on paper and hit all the right We-Are-Taking-This-Seriously buzzwords but somehow never result in the kids not being tortured every day, and if the kids' parents were to stop bringing them to child prison every day to get tortured anew the cops would haul those parents to jail, and sometimes the only solution is the parents to switch them to the charter schools THAT FREDDIE DEBOER WANTS TO SHUT DOWN.

I see people on Twitter and Reddit post their stories from child prison, all of which they treat like it's perfectly normal. The district that wanted to save money, so it banned teachers from turning the heat above 50 degrees in the depths of winter. The district that decided running was an unsafe activity, and so any child who ran or jumped or played other-than-sedately during recess would get sent to detention - yeah, that's fine, let's just make all our children spent the first 18 years of their life somewhere they're not allowed to run, that'll be totally normal child development. You might object that they can run at home, but of course teachers assign three hours of homework a day despite ample evidence that homework does not help learning. Preventing children from having any free time, or the ability to do any of the things they want to do seems to just be an end in itself. Every single doctor and psychologist in the world has pointed out that children and teens naturally follow a different sleep pattern than adults, probably closer to 12 PM to 9 AM than the average adult's 10 - 7. Child prisons usually start around 7 or 8 AM, meaning any child who shows up on time is necessarily sleep-deprived in ways that probably harm their health and development.

School forces children to be confined in an uninhabitable environment, restrained from moving, and psychologically tortured in a state of profound sleep deprivation, under pain of imprisoning their parents if they refuse. The only possible justification for this is that it achieves some kind of vital social benefit like eliminating poverty. If it doesn't, you might as well replace it with something less traumatizing, like child labor. The kid will still have to spend eight hours of their day toiling in a terrible environment, but at least they’ll get some pocket money! At least their boss can't tell them to keep working off the clock under the guise of "homework"! I have worked as a medical resident, widely considered one of the most horrifying and abusive jobs it is possible to take in a First World country. I can say with absolute confidence that I would gladly do another four years of residency if the only alternative was another four years of high school.

If I have children, I hope to be able to homeschool them. But if I can't homeschool them, I am incredibly grateful that the option exists to send them to a charter school that might not have all of these problems. I'm not as impressed with Montessori schools as some of my friends are, but at least as far as I can tell they let kids wander around free-range, and don't make them use bathroom passes. DeBoer not only wants to keep the whole prison-cum-meat-grinder alive and running, even after having proven it has no utility, he also wants to shut the only possible escape my future children will ever get unless I'm rich enough to quit work and care for them full time.

When I try to keep a cooler head about all of this, I understand that Freddie DeBoer doesn't want this. He is not a fan of freezing-cold classrooms or sleep deprivation or bullying or bathroom passes. In fact, he will probably blame all of these on the "neoliberal reformers" (although I went to school before most of the neoliberal reforms started, and I saw it all). He will say that his own utopian schooling system has none of this stuff. In fact, he does say that. He sketches what a future Marxist school system might look like, and it looks pretty much like a Montessori school looks now. That just makes it really weird that he wants to shut down all the schools that resemble his ideal today (or make them only available to the wealthy) in favor of forcing kids into schools about as different from it as it's possible for anything to be.

I am so, so tired of socialists who admit that the current system is a helltopian torturescape, then argue that we must prevent anyone from ever being able to escape it. Who promise that once the last alternative is closed off, once the last nice green place where a few people manage to hold off the miseries of the world is crushed, why then the helltopian torturescape will become a lovely utopia full of rainbows and unicorns. If you can make your system less miserable, make your system less miserable! Do it before forcing everyone else to participate in it under pain of imprisonment if they refuse! Forcing everyone to participate in your system and then making your system something other than a meat-grinder that takes in happy children and spits out dead-eyed traumatized eighteen-year-olds who have written 10,000 pages on symbolism in To Kill A Mockingbird and had zero normal happy experiences - is doing things super, super backwards!

#scott alexander #substack #book review #fredrik deboer #public schooling #long #read the whole thing

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eksbdan-blog · 5 years

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New Post has been published on https://passingbynehushtan.com/2019/10/17/christ-hermeneutics-death-spiral-pt-3/

Christ vs. the Hermeneutical Death Spiral part 3: Red Flags

This is an article in a series. Please see:

Christ and the Hermeneutical Death Spiral Part 2 Christ vs. the Hermeneutical Death Spiral, Part 1

Corrupt Hermeneutics: Hermeneutics and the Theologian

If you pick up a book or article on corrupt hermeneutics which argues for an antidote, which is not merely descriptive or retrospective, you’re always going to see it discussed with a wide range of historical alternatives. You might be surprised if I make the complaint that for theology, this is not a good thing and its a red flag for corrupt hermeneutics.

Christian Theology, and therefore any discussion of meaning, is supposed to be set on the basis of an organic instead of superficial dependency upon the belief and demonstration of a supernatural agency that works before the theologian, not after him. The logic follows that whatever you propose as a theologian it should be an offering not grounded first in reason, will, emotion or any other insular humanly produced industry or epistemic locus but set in a thing which insists on an other-worldly alternative to our own formulations. But the urge is always for the theologian to follow the broad spirit of the age, to fit in, to propose something that is immediately accessible to the prevailing methods and presuppositions.

To choose one “rule” from column A and speak of it as good or bad by comparison to those in column B which are the same kind of items is from the start this red flag for which I speak for bad hermeneutics. The pulling of modern and historical alternatives to your theory of meaning for comparison is not a red flag and not our giveaway, quite the contrary. It’s this engagement in a rigorous scholarly exercise to test a proposition against another when none of them carry their own force of meaning to make such a comparison necessary.

You know something is wrong. No one is going into combing through Truth and Method and Heidegger and speak about how Ricœur’s is a superior position on the nature of meaning if meaning showed itself unambiguously as centered on a historical person. No one is going to write reams of paper speculating what kinds of species of animal life should live in heart of the Congo or in unexplored regions of the earth if we have explored those regions and know. No one is going to say “I think alien life in the Sirius star system is carbon-based” or “I think it’s silicon-based” if we have gone there and know. But in Christianity, we burn up all our intellectual capital and time reading and lauding this kind of speculative theology instead of investigating the transcendent artifact we say we have in hand. Our scholarly hermeneutics is a red flag that we know nothing, and obviously prefer it, since it never adds anything more to what the simple historical phenomenon of the word of the Hebrew prophets delivers to the mind without them.

We forget that a revealed God is one who offers knowledge otherwise impossible. Original Christianity no matter how secretly embarrassing its methods and Truth might be to the thinker, never was and could never be a faith that triumphs in any way by joining that which is doggedly against it and could come only from brains and brawn.

It presents not a line of reason through an eloquent and perfectly parsed rhetorical flourish and neat organization, or a good idea that is a better alternative to another idea not so good, but insists a truth that is ultimate is saving is no idea at all. Truth is a simple fact of history that shows God’s existence, nature, and plan, set before its audience which either overwhelms or underwhelms them in our demonstration of its love or its hatred and indifference.

This is meant to set a baseline for all talk about meaning: do we really want the Truth, not or only a personally compatible version of it? If you want the truth, choose the one that looks like what is not here but belongs here.

The Christian theologian is always supposed to be an investigator and champion of the Christian idea against irrational, unfounded, constructed and merely fashionable ones. The real definition of the Christian theologian is something more like a pneumenaut of entirely new spaces, seeing entirely new things revealed 2000 years ago, spirits riding on a ship not physical and made by human hands, not like an astronaut who can only penetrate new matter beyond old matter.

In the theologian’s presentation, if the analysis of another hermeneutic and comparison to the chosen hermeneutic is done to show error by contrast, that’s what we want, but not if what you propose is essentially the same as the error you eschew.

For me to positively demonstrate this error, or if it even exits in part, it is still effective to show error by contrast, but not by the same kind of contrast which is the same as the error. What is needed is to show the whole of the defective enterprise by its difference to something alien to the whole process, which is not fundamentally like it, since this is supposed to be that otherwise impossible Christian revelation. The theologian is removed from all contrived systems from the start. Zooming out, staying at a distance where one is informed of them as an observer, not an inhabitant, and performs analysis from the perspective of wholes instead of parts.

He tries to determine the extent to which the indispensable assumptions of the approach he proposes (and by extension the text in which he proposes to apply a certain hermeneutic) is compatible with others in respect to its ability to render a meaning that agrees with and magnifies the meaning of transcendent substances instead of relatively prosaic superficialities. If your going to contrast what is presumed to be alien to a mundane or defective idea to show their incompatibilities, our operational rule is that the idea must at least be as radically different as a prosaic thing to the alien thing.

It’s the presumption and belief that we have something unique and radically foreign which is not a method, not an idea and not a feeling, but a public, supernatural event.

Gadamer was right in that the process is at least supposed to be more about Truth’s than Method’s, but Truth in Christianity is without his entirely subjective control of its meaning. Yes, we have become inured and numbed by “science,” by the idea that, if our eyesight to resolve a destination is failing, no matter where we set our minds to go, a proper number of precise steps, instead of a proper number of precise steps in a particular direction, will bring us home. The takeaway here is that a destination as part of the science of methods that are reasoned to and constructed by humans are always in orientation with the tendency for human insularity and independence. If the destination is not supposed to be human, at least in part, then if we have any eyesight left we had better use it make sure the course to it matches, not that we are walking. If the destination is foreign then the method should be foreign, that is, the supernatural destination object is itself the makeup of the lens through which we clearly find our orientation to it.

If you think that I am building to something like “use the spirit and he will tell you what it means,” this is no more idiosyncratic and subjectively grounded than it is to the equally human scientific method, which is great for the settling of the emotions and discovery of matter but useless for anything else.

“Spirit” is a concept, an idea, we must remember. Millennia of human religious history is about the entertaining of this concept endlessly in philosophical discussion, but our belief is that the Cross established “Spirit” as a reality in history. If that is true, the Cross destroyed “spirit” forever as unknown, unreachable, unfathomable, and a product only of the mind and emotions. The same with the ideas “God,” “truth,” “faith,” “evidence,” “righteousness” and “sin. To then say “spirit” and not biblically qualify it and establish it without the possibility of disconnection in a perspicuous and universal fact not revealed by science or subjectivity, believing that it’s nonetheless with power and a real thing of objective transcendence, is a worship of a human concept as much as Grant Osbourne’s Hermeneutical Spiral can be a worship of method.

An emotional attachment to an insular idea and then several of a certain kind of rational steps, or an intellectual attachment to rational steps and then to an idea, instead of one to and from the supernatural appearance of phenomena, is an attachment to us, not it. If this supernatural phenomenon is said to originate in what is essentially reason and emotion itself, orientation to it and exclusive dependence upon it for your means of meaning is not the loss of meaning, reason or love, just a degraded one in which you are now a helpless dependent. The belief in it as transcendent is still the symbol of its own kind in ontological relation to its being of creation, but only a being that will die with it. You can have all the love and good feelings and intellectual pursuit you want, but I hope that it comes from a real place that is imperishable.

All of the foregoing is why our kind of approach to the problem here is not going to burden you with hundreds of pages of explanations and illustrations of one author’s philosophy against another. This is decided for us, because, as I have said in another way, you won’t find a nut through a painstaking search under the shade of a tree that does not bear them. We need to match the kind ofnut for the tree, but to do this we need to speak about trees not as atoms or ideas or the result of a natural process but as totalities from a distance.

Not that a close examination of the tree is not essential to its speciation and then it’s fruit. I only propose that because we as Christians have lost the ability to make sense of and revere biblical totalities and ultimate’s, and have spent so much time under a humanly constructed tree given as the only one we are supposed to visit, we have called that tree divine because we don’t know how to leave it and find the other one that need not be called anything to be divine.

The Tree is the Tree of Life. It’s not some other tree. The first step then in leaving a perishable tree and finding that Tree of Life is to break our gaze upon the dying one, and its identifying bark, leaves and stems, and fix it on the horizon until our eyesight improves to see distances. We might just see on the horizon the good tree we left long ago that we wandered away from, and then start our trek back to it with only it as our destination. We don’t start with speculation, we start, again, by honestly determining what looks most like is not from here but belongs here.

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Corrupt Hermeneutics: Lost in Method

Planting explosives on the hulls of theologically liberal ships and bringing them to the bottom is easy. They are pretty, with plenty of pastel paint applied, of fashionable design, but they are not guarded, they leak like swiss cheese the more they are in the water and their keels were poorly laid down from the start. Its almost as if they were built and manned as momentary flights of fancy to only express a conceptual ship of ideal shape but, having invested so much in it there is nothing left to give the seaworthiness.

Now, conservative vessels are another matter. They are always built strong and seemingly unassailable. Not created for the show but the go. They lack personability and aesthetics, the inner appeal, but excel in prudence and sound design. They are also aesthetically deficient. Prudence may seem better than pretty, but this is not saying that conservative ships are better overall than the liberal ones, nor the liberal better than the conservative unless there is a ship already at hand that was not built by human hands, has ethereal beauty, design, inexhaustible propulsion, and has no need for a guard because it can’t be destroyed.

Liberal theology is just too easy to knock down. It’s not a challenge. It’s also not necessary if the point is to convince, not emote.

Orthodoxy, conservatism, holds the Bible as authoritative and revered. It is a no-brainer that the leftist idea of the Bible as one spiritual document to be stacked upon a hundred others as equals, written only by the inspiration from the minds of ancient, clueless and superstitious agrarians, is liberal a theology that is a non-starter for a faith which is supposed to be exclusively generated and fired by its unique revelatory contents. Orthodoxy believes this, but for all its posturing it refuses to even entertain the thought that a ship, and ancient and transcendent artifact, is their sole transcendent vehicle to bring them to God.

Indeed, their pride is in their systems, their reasonability, their carefulness, the dependence upon “facts” generally, arguments that appeal to logic. History as it was and not how we wish it were, the fact of the natural blackness of the human heart, and many others that are hard for anyone still thinking to eschew. But it’s not these that we have a problem with, the problem is putting them first, and when they are put first it is guaranteed that “logic,” “history,” “reason,” “fact,” and even “God” in a theological discussion are not going to be servants of God. They will be our gods.

I want to first come at this from the perspective of the god of organization, procedure, structure, logic. Because we have been so blinded, so trained to admit a solid demarcation between what is an idea and what is thought only a dispassionate and neutral process in our thinking, you may grow weary when I speak about the idea of “God” as a god, or “faith” as a god, as if to say there is no God and no real faith possible. No, not in the farthest reaches of the imagination. I am advocating Christian fundamentalism that is too fundamental for the fundamentalists and too radical for the radicals, as it always was. This is not about whether Biblical concepts or a biblically endorsed method are true, it’s about whether these are going to be your direct point of contact with the Biblical revelation.

We will find that when they are not, that Revelation, that is, the theophany of a God of history as it presents itself to the mind and heart, is allowed to be what it is: its own self-contained, self-generating, self-attesting method and cause for deep and penetrating illumination and emotion which are implanted in the individual and work organically with him, to a degree even without conscious reflection. We reflect on and understand why the Christ and the Apostles never laid out a formal systematic theology, never pointedly established a formal definition of “meaning,” never thought it necessary to define “revelation” and certainly never needed to take an extra effort to assure us what “meaning” means.

Grant Obsorne or anyone else is not singled out by any means. They are only examples of any such lost attempt you will see. He is mentioned only because he’s a classic symbol of organization and scholarship that invites the reader to a rational, balanced method for meaning, in a conservative fashion. He also symbolizes, so much against our natural inclinations, the out of control hermeneutic that I suggest.

In this kind of work, which applies even more so to those liberal, the reader must be a certain kind, and not the one who must absorb the great truths of the biblical text only by control of that which has no biblical equivalence. Almost all others won’t see the bait and switch because, well, how could one possibly reject a text-to-context hermeneutic? And if you accept it then you need to use it. If you use it, you will become its defender. If you become a defender maybe your still a Christian, but only insofar as the degree of what you defend is fundamentally like anything that was given by God to render meaning that is spoken of in Scripture which is said to contain meaning, not just guide a possible path to it.

Superficially, is there anything wrong here with the Hermeneutical Spiral? No, not in the least. It’s an excellent demonstration of moderation and sober reasoning. Is there anything wrong with losing sight of the issues in play and applying these rules, keeping in mind these dangers of fallacious and unwarranted applications? No, of course not. Do I recommend its reading and application? Of course, I do, I endorse it. But in its descriptions of egregious errors and proper application of a solution will we see the most egregious and fundamental type of error or solution? Will we see the point of revelation, the uncovering of a truth of Christianity that might have been lost which was the loss of the faith itself? Will we find the Holy antithesis to a fallen faith? Never in an eternity of years of simians in a room full of typewriters.

But, you say, this is not the purpose of the book! My response is that, in a nutshell, is the problem.

Here is the beginning of Osborne’s book:

Context

The Historical Context

The Logical Context

Studying the Whole: Charting a Book

Studying the Parts: Diagramming the Paragraph/ 3. Arcing

Rhetorical or Compositional Pattern

Grammar

The Preliminary Task: Establishing the Text

External Criteria

Internal Criteria

Grammatical Analysis of the Text

The Historical Development

The Verb System

The Noun System 3

Prepositions, Particles and Clauses

Exegetical Procedures

Semantics

Semantic Fallacies

The Lexical Fallacy

The Root Fallacy

Misuse of Etymology

Misuse of Subsequent Meaning

The One-Meaning Fallacy

Now, this is valuable stuff. Background specific information and a thorough understanding of fallacious conclusions. All these issues of bad interpretation are not optional to our education about biblical meaning at its beginning.

But if there is one thing we should also be able to agree upon is that all these concepts, in every line of this outline, are something that need not have been precipitated or necessitated by exclusively an outside, supernatural agency. You can say they were motivated or inspired by one, but these direct objects of our apprehension of meaning are not that agency itself.

We can choose to believe that the author was motivated in producing this by a real supernatural, objective revelation of God, but we can’t see it for ourselves in these chapter headings because it is never used to modify and qualify them. You don’t read anything that shows or forces the supernatural, nor do you see in the subsequent treatment of these subjects only a historical, supernatural, biblical thing as a guide and magistrate over the results of the biblical meaning in which it leads. Unless of, of course, its another opaque and constructed hermeneutical agency, the concept “God.”

Please do not confuse this with me saying that there is no “God.” My argument is the opposite of this. It means that the concept “God” is not God, it’s only an idea that must be made by us in order to index, organize and mark the place where is to be found the phenomenon of God himself as he gave it to the world. We have been trained to think that our constructions are Truth, are divine, when they are only very crucial but transcendently unoriginal symbols of it.

The human motivation and its product are one and the same: invisible to casual observation, locked without an apparent need for unlocking to that which they are not. Yet a supernatural agency working objectively in history is precisely the bedrock of the definition of revelation in the Bible, and some form of the re-appearance of this historical display in the New Testament is not only the prescription and definition of meaning but the bedrock of faith. They are both supposed to be supernatural. The rule and the product are either of human contrivance or they are both of divine agency on their way to meaning and understanding.

This is not to say that human conceptualizations are bad, and certainly not human language. They are essential. We would be living on an animalistic level without them. But this fact is what hides instead of reveals.

This Christian assumption, if such direct transcendent control by supernatural knowledge is lacking, can only bring us to a similar level equal with unrevealed, pagan religion: the religion of “feel it, know it,” or “measure it, know it.” These ways of knowing can’t produce products of open alien phenomena which are both accessible and clearly of another world which Christians say came 2000 years ago.

If there is a supernatural motivation of the author that sits behind a knowing by “procedure” or “intuition,” everyone is supposed to have access to its products, it has to be a part of “procedure” and “intuition” and its subject to objective scrutiny as to its reality. If not, how much you want to bet the author does not believe that any such genuine, objective alien artifact exists outside of subjectivity or matter? That it is not believed that such a thing happened 2000 years ago and certainly has no machine-code level part in an investigation in how to read the bible right?

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The upshot is that mere ideas, which are independently without revelation’s explicit established contextualization and definition, are human products, not divine ones, that can and must to a great extent originate entirely within the mind, between humans alone, and die there if not proven strictly tied to ultimately foreign realities. That objectively transcendent, scriptural revelation of which I insist uses concepts for its representation, but that is an entirely different thing than saying concepts are revelation itself.

You see, I am really interested in being more fundamental than any fundamentalist, and more radical than any radical. Deception is not only an argument failing on the basis of bad premises and logic that nevertheless reaches a really attractive and desired conclusion that we wrongly accept. Deception is a conclusive idea failing because of no direct supernatural dependency but accepted because it is a child by a beautiful, grand and intelligent procedure that we love more. Deception is produced by easily exposable tricks of affection and nuanced and subtitle tricks of reason. Liberalism and conservatism are like twins fused at the hip, who also share the same brain. They represent fundamental and radical carnality, but not fundamental and radical spirituality, in which no such chimera exists.

This is the one hermeneutical rule that is, by far, the most important, because if you lose it you will begin to unconsciously handle ideas as a container, a controlling source of divine knowledge, instead of a dependent content. You cant control meaning with an artificial and dependent creation and moral choice of man. When this happens, nothing you can think or say about the transcendent will have, if it exists, a supernatural controlling premise and will be, although appearing noble and pious, ultimately worthless for the task it pretends.

God does not give ideas, God gives phenomena as the overarching magistrate over the content of meaning, and all generated ideas are supposed to strictly obey that phenomenon alone. This is to say that meaning flows directly from the observation and reaction to that appearing of the divine, and that objective divinity is not an idea, reason or a feeling about things except as accurate or twisted reflectors of it.

I point this self-evident fact out in this way not to say that Osbourne’s outline, the subjects with which he deals, and the manner in which he deals with them, are in error. I use his book to show that the solution to any subject-to-object problem in biblical hermeneutics to which he leads cannot be toward a subject or object which is motivated by or resembles “conceptual” or “propositional” “knowledge.” Not consciously misaligning them as a preface to the whole thing to show a lack of dependence upon an insular dialogic is to join it in a disastrous explanation of Christian meaning.

It may take a while for me to give you the kind of revelation about Christian hermeneutics as is expected of the theologian, to clearly point out what of divine hermeneutics he typically is not motivated, so I ask some patience. On the surface, it may seem that I am picking nits or am seriously misinformed, but I assure you, this is far from the case.

Again, going forward, to not find ourselves under the same dying tree we need to take in the whole thing with a certain blinder off and from a distance. We are not advocating against Osborune or anyone else for that matter. We are advocating for a new start upon which to reorient their approaches and make an evaluation as to the extent of their usefulness in knowing the one indispensable essential hermeneutical rule of the NT. Which, by the way, they never do broach unless to deny its existence.

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Corrupt Hermeneutics: Methods and Meaning

If you ask any conservative scholar to comment on any errors in the foregoing “Lost in Method,” there won’t be much. But the reason they won’t disagree with this re-emphasis on a biblical revelation to ground and control meaning, a revelation which they say are trying to explain and serve, is that everything I said about “revelation” and “supernatural” can be taken as represented by a proposition, not phenomena. Phenomena without which there is no possible meaning and no salvation.

A proposition is “Jesus is Lord,” or “the blood of Christ cleanses of all sin,” or “God is sovereign.” But did you ever stop and think whether these propositions display a supernatural appearance of God? Whether they can be said the same in an essential sense, in the sense of knowledge, the equal of God? They can’t and they aren’t. Although the human indwelling of God is supposed to be essential to teach them rightly, why is this indwelling only spoken of by them in the form of being and not particular kind of knowledge publicly accessible and demonstrable of Him which would be impossible to obtain without him giving it to us?

I constantly talk about this biblical vital center and the equivalent of God implanted in the mind which is supernatural and impossible to duplicate by man. Now I say that it acts as its own dynamic magistrate over meaning that produces the required moderation, moral thinking, and circumspection to render the original meaning of the text without a conservative scholarship that uses other means to teach it. I will get back to this and the issue of propositions later that is thought the equivalent to Truth and a counterbalance to the problems of an uncontrolled subjective interpretation, but first let me ask you to think about some set-up ideas.

With “methods and meaning” there is a means of reaching a product and an end-product. Subject is fundamental to any of the usual ruminations on hermeneutics, so I must put something down from the get-go.

You have people essentially arguing for the application of a system of procedure and those for the needs of the reader. Then you have those who take both into account, that both are important, and you must come up with a scheme that pulls from the text something accurate and equally allows it to apply to an individual. Neither lobe nor a happy middle, however, is what a good biblical hermeneutic is about.

The fact is that this objective supernatural phenomenon of which I speak dynamically creates its own method and meaning for the subject. If it’s kept in view, it continually pushes out the incorrigible implication of the text into man’s mind and spirit without the need for constant reflection on self or reasoned systems. In short, the method and meaning are itself some kind of appearance of God before the reader sees anything pertaining to its testimony and elucidation by another.

This diametric, “method and meaning,” is different here than saying “there is a proposition and a means of determining or constructing that proposition.” For a Christian, a “method” is not a human method, and “product” is not a human product except in the sense of it being human intelligible. They are prepared for integration into his noetic condition and ability, but not determined by it, having come from a place far away which has created the possibility of a noetic condition and ability in which an essential moral act can take place.

A proposition, like “Jesus is Lord” or “Paul understood sin as debit,” are concepts; creative products of the mind. It’s the end, or conclusion, of the result of a chain of evidence, other propositions, data, potentialities, theories. The concept is a construct used to represent those, not those predicates themselves.

Concepts are not bad. They are the most precious abstract, mundane thing humans have, and make him human. But they are only tagging in symbolic fashion a group of predicating information as a totality so that a thought can be built to form a greater one made from more knowledge and allow him a trans-human end.

A belief is an arrangement of concepts, but emerging from and controlled by various sources of real information. The proposition or concept “Jesus is Lord” is not a supernatural object of worship, it’s only a marker for a number of data points pertaining to displays of that object. These are supposed to support the belief that Jesus is a supernatural object of worship, which are themselves supernatural because Jesus is presumed so. These data points are not your dreams, your feelings, your tradition or anything mundane and unconfirmable by anyone else, because these are not public transcendent displays and open to inquiry and independent confirmation. They need to be “truth,” reality, facts, and have the potential of showing it openly. Therefore, “Jesus is Lord” is a concept which is of a supernatural implication, but is not supernatural evidence or reason, and then can’t be treated as the source of divine epistemic power to independently inspire or carry what Christians call faith.

“Truth,” which is often used for “meaning,” should not be. Although a concept, “Truth” has not a fundamental meaning, in the biblical sense, of a construct or a mere voluntary conclusion. It’s one of those essential concepts that can be removed without destroying a mind.

“Meaning” is what reality implies to consciousness, not what it is. “Truth” is fundamentally that which corresponds to reality, and reality is something objective that invades subjectivity but not created by it.

Meaning and Truth is ultimately a phenomenon, an appearance of an object or fact otherwise hidden if It does not make itself known, and induction and induction are human methods for consciously connecting the cause and the phenomenal effect, but only necessary as conscious controls when Truth is put as a proposition, not a phenomenon, where the phenomena controls the process of linking. Because we have lost contact with any sense of an abiding “Truth” which has its own power of persuasion to choose and guide a method of its resolution to the great questions of existence, we confuse “Truth” to mean only a personal construct and confuse a method to it as a universal truth in itself. “Truth” in the biblical sense aligns more with supernatural “method” than with “meaning.” We derive our meaning from Truth, the theophany of God which is objective, not Truth from our meaning, which is morally tied to it but morally voluntary for the individual.

Using “truth” for “method” as I suggest as working interchangeably in biblical hermeneutics, if applied to any other study, will swallow it whole and destroy it. Science,” for example, the method, is in casual conversation put for the truth it is capable of resolving, and in doing so you begin to believe its capabilities unlimited, reaching far beyond what it is capable into metaphysics. Therefore science has become a kind of cultish belief that resembles more the unfounded pagan faiths of antiquity than it does the original aims of the scientific method: it has no revelation of transcendence, but zealously makes pronouncements of them. “God does not exist,” “matter is all that ever was and ever will be.” Extreme objectivity destroying its professed and revered objectivity, where extreme subjectivity is its only refuge.

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The fallacy is also found in insular experientialism, as with the New Age, the Occult and many charismatic groups. We now use “Truth” for “meaning,” a personal independent power of talismanic quality to fire and inform the intellect and emotions that do not need a justifying means outside of the person holding it. Extreme subjectivity destroying its dependent and revered spiritual subject, where an extreme objective state is the only result, leaving them as mere bodies/minds with entangled and contradictory feelings and beliefs only for the benefit of that particular body/mind.

Both essentially start and end in the same place: here in the world. However, in the biblical revelation, as we will see, when Truth is an appearance of God to the physical or noetic senses and also the method of its elucidation, hermeneutics becomes locked exclusively to the divine mind both methodologically and meaningfully. It’s not given up to humanly contrived systems that can break down are misinterpreted. The result is that the subject is entirely controlled in the entire process of understanding and illumination by the active invasion of that mind by a divine objective object which is, in turn, the equivalent of that mind.

Noun Flattening

This tendency to make truth a method and method truth outside of this theophany, which I suggest must exist in a real revelatory document, is what I call a kind of noun flattening. As I said, used in biblical hermeneutics this is deadly, and that is why Christian hermeneutics is being destroyed, because it’s not Christian, it’s secular dressed up as Christian, yet is nonetheless the world interpreter of what Christian meaning means.

As I continue to describe this noun flattening or noun norming as uncontextualized or qualified uses of theological keywords in our theology, I don’t mean that the theologian is not using “Faith” or “God” or “love” while not having in mind a particular kind which is real, or that he is not going to explain them later. I mean the destruction is happening because of casual use of them in sentences without qualification. When they are not qualified as to a specific biblical revelatory device, it is guaranteed that they will be subsequently thought of and used as having independent propositional power, as in a secular understanding of Truth, and never qualified at all. The scholar’s work will then essentially be an argument or description of the power of understanding and meaning through discussion, reason, and ideas, not through this appearance of God of which I speak.

When we study hermeneutics, we often find goals and methods (conclusive concepts and directional concepts) generalized, used with operational terms used to only categorize crucial concepts. The reason why we do this is because “meaning,” supposedly the ultimate goal of hermeneutics, has lost “meaning” because “meaning,” our keyword, is itself become a flattened, or uncontextualized concept, as has “Truth” and “Method.”

Now, this is fine, except for Christian theology. Why? Because before any one or a number of key theological words, meaning is already supposed to be qualified conceptually by a presumption about the ultimate nature of reality, the ordering force behind it and the revealing of that force.

We are are not talking about getting meaning from your insurance policy, Moby Dick, or Newton’s Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica. Newton’s is a little different writing about only natural things since he assumed God was behind everything, but his discussion is about physics, not God. There is no threat that the reality of matter is something that will have to be argued for and either won or lost. So, if a flattened concept like “inertia” is used it is a certainty that it will be understood properly as long as matter is not seen as fiction. It emerges to explain matter and, if it dies and falls out of use because of the discoveries of science, science is not degraded but is perhaps refined and improved with a clearer view of reality as matter.

But you cant treat theology like science because, well, our natural reflex is not necessary to disbelieve that there is a God, but that there is an indispensable revelation him that we are as responsible for in our theology as we are of “God.” If you use “faith” without qualification when there is a biblical one, then “faith” becomes, in this reflex, defaulted to “God,” the idea, and then to nothing, a feeling, a comfortable delusion, the result of a conscious and controlled calculation, or to our insular selves and a mere a ideational plaything. Hermeneutics is supposed to be, however, “Christian Hermeneutics,” not “Hermeneutics,” and Christian Hermeneutics literally means “the study of meaning within those who take it from the revelation of Messiah.”

Lose that fact and Christian hermeneutics becomes a discussion of methods, errors, histories, and arguments for meaning like science does its unqualified nouns, without any necessary reference to its controlling authorities and its meaning first. This results in time to the death of theology, not its improvement.

Outer-Space, Inner-Space

To illustrate this, let me give an analogy of which I am fond.

Imagine all existence in the perception of man beginning as a big house, with outer, surrounding space and inner space. Everyone is born into the inner space. No human created the inner space. We are only living there. The only thing that is changeable is the paint and anything that was in this interior room before, and then what is made by the occupants out of what was there before.

There is also an outer space to this room that is inaccessible. The outer space is imagined existing because there is a small window built into the inner space on the side of its outer perimeter, without which an outer space would not be possible to thought. That window is blackened from the outside. Like the walls, this window can be boarded up but it can’t be removed. There would be pitch-black darkness in this inner space were it not for the light that man himself produces by work, such as from a fire.

Think of the inner space as mankind’s natural epistemic state in relation to transcendence. He starts out with only his body, mind and matter in what seems to be the only area of existence. But there is a compelling and inextricable portal in the conception of existence to another one, of a reality where everything we know is its contingency, controlling and living far beyond him and his exhaustive understanding. The occupant is dependent on matter, food, water, gravity, light, air, his body, others. Like mankind to his circumstances, he is transitory and dies because he needs something else other than what he knows to stop it over which he has no control. This suggests the existence of that which is not contingent and that which is, yet produces this space in which man can live.

But it’s only a compelling idea. It is thought about and many books are written on some version of this analogy (axiomatically, Plato’s allegory of the Cave), but no one knows really if such an outer place exists. It could just as well be a trick of thought. Mans dependency to a force or thing which was before man and lives long after him is only an analogy to outer space, but this is not proof of such a space.

But this window exists and can’t be removed, even if it could be, without dire consequences because without it even the thought of improvement would only be limited only to a more efficient avoidance of pain. This window is what even Hegal might have called the directionality of history in the achievement of human freedom. The positing of “the Good” and the whole concept of morality by Plato. The presumption of eventual complete disclosure of the processes and forces of nature through the scientific method and our release from the confines of nature thereby. Hope that things will get better if we take a certain course. That there is an authority above us to which we might go.

Without the window, there is no basis for philosophy, science, religion or thought unnecessary to immediate bodily survival. The idea of “spirit,” “consciousness,” “will,” “dimension,” “contingent-eternal,” “hidden and disclosed,” “symbolic and substantive,” “body and mind,” “cause and effect,” “subject and object,” “known and unknown.” Everything begins with present human perception and then a state beyond matter, in the mind, which is itself not limited to matter, but in its weakness is constantly changing and pulled by what it is not, can’t be seen, what is obscure and arcane, undiscovered, coded, superior. The window gives consciousness upward movement, improvability, and hope beyond the circumstance. There is something beyond us and something close, and what is beyond us might give us some of its perfections and eternality, and leads us toward it, allow us into its space, without which there is no such movement except to eat, sleep, dream, have sex and die in the same conditions as in the beginning.

What happens one day is that through eons of living in this inner space and building great systems of faith and philosophy pertaining to this outer space, within many manmade partitioned rooms, a blinding light comes out of that window. This makes that structural crease between outer and inner no longer just a matter of a foundational symbol of transcendence that moves the occupants of the inner space to an unknown and foggy improvement of knowledge compelled only by a powerful, fundamental analogy. The light means for the first time that there is a real outer-space to conceptual outer-space, and someone maybe just turned the light on.

The light is the most significant event in the history of the inner space and has profound implications. For the first time, it sets the bar for the standard of speculation about transcendence. Now, serious thought about it cannot only be a matter of feeling, desire or idle and unfounded speculation. For the first time there is light coming from out there, and now an insistence on a present and public demonstration of this outer space before any serious talk about an outer-space.

But you still don’t know for sure. Maybe there is nothing out there but light, and the light is light but seemingly carries no content.

What happens is that the light is too strong. Yes, it lights every corner of the inner space, making no need for man to create improved light sources, but it’s just too bright. It hurts. Unable to know anything more of this transcendence but that now there is light, most of the occupants start to make partitions for study, partitions of great philosophy, science, and theology, but now with a deep debt to this light, which made Truth perhaps possible, objective and non-speculative. But because the partitions are not tall enough to sufficiently block the light and return the room to pe-light conditions for which their eyes are adjusted, they tear down the old partitions and make new, higher ones, moving deeper into the inner space where the light is not as strong. But then, since the light is not as strong, they have to make their own light sources, like electric lamps of various light colors, shapes, and intensities to replace the loss.

While all this is going on, there a few people that stay on the perimeter of the inner space at the window, because the appearance of that light had a deeper effect on them. They stare as long as they can at the window and try to train their eyes to handle the light. Perhaps they can see through it and come to see who or what is producing it. What they come to see through the intensity is not only the person who turned the light on, and other beings as well, but many things inside that outer space. Everything they see there is analogous to what is in their area, yet imperishable and original, making its contingency to us clearly not possible, but ours to it.

The theology of the inner partitions, however, have been under their lamps for so long they have developed their own language, even after millennia since the light first appeared. They know very well what this light means and from where it is coming, and can’t ignore it, yet have learned to think and write in a way that, as before the light came, puts it back into a dependency of people, when only the imagination and personal choice determined it. The way they do this is to use the words that imply the light yet use sentences that don’t refer to transcendence as its exclusive dependency, which makes them open to the one known only under artificial lighting. This allows everyone within the inner rooms to justify their existence there when they should be at the window.

But here is the judgment of these people who have been standing at the Window to those locked away in their man-made inner rooms of scholarship:

You’re not supposed to say “window,” as they do, you should say “Window of transcendent light.” Otherwise, “light” can be some kind of man-made or voluntary light.

You’re are not supposed to say “person,” but person seen in the transcendent light.” Otherwise, the person could be a chimera, a bare concept, someone “enlightened” within the inner space or anyone for that matter.

You’re not supposed to say “being” but “being seen in the transcendent light.” Being could refer to the philosophical concept of ontology, an ultimate human person that comes from years of technological or emotional improvement, not necessarily revealed only in that light.

If what is seen through the window is a table of some kind, you don’t simply refer to it as “table,” but that it is the “table not in the inner-space.” If not, “table” will be any table.

This is noun flattening. It’s a very sneaky way of being an astronaut that has all the clout of a pneumanaut. It forces or gives the ability of the reader to limit all things within the inner-space in which we have become ultimate explorers.

When a thing loses identifying speciation it can only be spoken of in terms of genera or family, and later as an Order, then as a Phyla, and then not at all if that insular thing is falsely proposed as an ultimate and essentially foreign thing. It does not matter if the word is used in a context that is right for it, and its speciated in later sentences. If it’s used casually and disconnected from its particular referent which is predicting and eternal, the writing is at least unconsciously operating under the assumption that concepts alone transmit and contain Truth. The apostles could get away with this, using the words that implied something special and transcendent, and take it for granted, but we cant in an age where even the ideas of “truth” and “reality” is under assault and destruction.

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Corrupt Hermeneutics: Red Flags

Here are some of my giveaways that what we are reading is not compatible with the original Christian view of revelation.

The medieval interpretive Quadriga, we have “Moral” and “Anagogical,” “Literal,” “Allegorical.” There is not a whole lot to see here, but these methods, giving a compact summary of what is possible, suggest one for sure, which is not one of them.

Most of the time when the Quadriga is brought up its to comment on the allegorical method, by far the most divisive today. Of course, the issue of seeing anything that does not appear there naturally is always going to raise the hackles of those that strive for moderation, prudence, and reason in their interpretive efforts. But I think the more important takeaway is the impression that this makes those for whom the Christian revelation is of a character that does not first seem to inspire landfalls of meaning for which our first instinct between us and it must be something like “remain calm, carry on.”

I also don’t think that a sudden Foxnews newsreel of a billion heavenly beings descending from the clouds all over the world to necessarily call for moderation as our first reflex, with all we know and have been looking for in biblical texts, or to start devising a system by which our understanding of this event will be properly classified. This is not to say that 2000 years after an earth-shattering miraculous event should not give reflection to interpretive classifications and systems, but it does mean that if what we received was really believed to be unequivocally a demonstration of the fact of God and his nature interpretations first reflex is an undiluted awe and a retelling of what occurred to induce it.

It seems to me that any progress in our reflection to this event that is not a simple effort to connect the dots between what was written and what has occurred is not really an expression of the awe of witnessing a supernatural event, but doubt, such that it must be controlled by reason and artificial, conceptual filtering structures if it is to be raised to a level of cognition which is capable of understanding it. This is then quite different than a supernatural event changing and controlling meaning, as the relation of God to his people. It’s about people changing and controlling the event and then God.

I’m not nitpicking, I’m only describing the difference between what Christ and the apostles laid down and what we have done in response, which is not a simple reaction but various and sundry expressions of engagement with our own power to produce awe, if you will, instead of using God awe. The fact is not to be minimized that Jesus the Messiah and those immediately after him who were witnesses of him never devised such categories and never thought it even necessary, for example, for future generations to understand that when they said “scripture” they were talking about the Old Testament, and particularly of its revelation of Jesus and the consequences of his fulfilling of prophecy. Why do we di differently?

This seems like a minor complaint until we continue to see a pattern.

Corrupt Hermeneutics: Noun Flattening and Beyond

Conceptual flattening or noun norming words are mostly an unconscious attempt to conflate ideas with multiple biblical dependencies into one that inexorably carries none. But these are words that can’t function in a biblical context unless modified by another which represents not a religious concept or name but a refers to its specific biblical, miraculous predicate. If we don’t deliberately supply what the apostles and Christ took for granted, done providentially to set a context for a test of our faith by motivation, in a world where “science” means “truth” or “truth” means “me” we will lose even the most crucial concept to human cognition: God.

The interrogative strategy of Jesus, who himself was to faith the equal of the prophetic revelation concerning him, asked messianic questions, or related a parable or incident, holding back that proper answer and awaiting it from the hearer who could see it. This strategy was to keep faithless out of the Kingdom, those who are unmoved by this supernatural scriptural phenomenon proving God while drawing those who were already prepared. Christ’s divine opinion is that if you don’t know his answer, or don’t believe it, speaking religiously and holding it back, either consciously or unconsciously, is the same and its and His denial.

Our strategy of faith destruction is making sure we disobey Him. Our hermeneutics are like people on the street crying “meaning, meaning, meaning.” It is not until you approach them and ask them for this meaning that you find a blank stare and empty hands. Turning from you, they continue to shout “meaning, meaning, meaning”, meaning that they have none except “meaning.” We have meaning, or meaning is very, very close at hand for our examination and choice, but we prefer “meaning” to Christ and his special, non-conceptual one.

In this internal or external norming sin. Because words are not speciated by their informational authorities upfront, the reader is not compelled to take them as such unless the writer makes a separate effort to do so. But the informational authority for faith in the New Testament is “prophetic faith” not “faith.” “Christ” is taken as the last name of Jesus, when it means “Messiah,” an informational authority pointing to the same prophetic revelation. “Righteousness” is flattened as a righteousness of physical doing, performing something physically, the deontological equivalent being the belief in a religious proposition when in the New Testament righteousness is more like the same: a righteousness around the handling of prophetic knowledge, around doing things and believing things with and for the sake of the fulfilments of God by his Messiah Jesus. “Word of God” is not a general Word or any biblical word you wish that turns you on or helps you make it through the night, but that same specific Word. Again, it’s more like “The Prophetic Word of God pertaining to Jesus Christ.”

The flattening by Jesus was one thing. Its to give the truth a deliberate shield from these others. This other one is done by the carnal mind because there is a default tendency to use what we already have instead of going out and acquiring something else. What we have is culture, numerous seemingly easy paths to any goal, many voices of instruction, conversational shorthand, personal bias in speaking only about what is appealing and self-affirming instead existentially challenging, good feelings and intellectual stimulation. A flattened concept with no phenomenal authority closes down what is intended to be an open, focused transcendent pathway and simultaneously opens another one inside the psyche that brings up instead an unlimited horizon of self-actualizing possibilities without such authority.

Discussions of Methods in theology are further presented as general principles that need not be taken for granted to refer to the transcendent world as science does with the idea of “gravitation” to the temporal world because transcendence is not of our natural experience and knowledge and is against our natures. In theology, there must be built-in, referential indicators of an ultimate and demonstrated supernatural Truth or it will be thought of like something originating and ending in the temporal world alone. It is not the occult, the New Age, heterodox beliefs, alcohol and drugs, sex or a general conception of “sin” that is killing us, its certain kind of sin, and one that is normally undetectable and seemingly innocuous, which is the sin of maintaining of prosaic language in talk about the greatest and most transformational event in human history.

For example, “Historical Grammatical.” Historical-Critical.” ‘Reader Response.” These biblical interpretative approaches are differentiated by trivial and identical presuppositions on how to frame if to frame at all, supernatural phenomena. I ask the reader to think back to any work on hermeneutics he has ever read. None refer to that phenomena, only to a broad, scientific principle of reading something correctly, and if a particular “meaning “is suggested it is a meaning that is as flattened as its symbol. For example, “Cross” means “sacrifice” or “love” or “death” or “altar” or “evangelistic work where one accepts the possibility of one’s death.”

Within these methods are “hermeneutical circle” and “hermeneutical spiral.” The person and text are at the center, constantly referring to individual parts bringing in all relevant parts to capture Truth as a whole, or meaning moves from text to context. The Rabbinic form is “text to text.” For Gadamer its dialogical, questions and answers in his “Fusion of Horizons.” Derrida and many others: “Deconstruction.”

In the same pattern, there is another anti-Christian urge in hermeneutics: not only to leave an ultimate, categorical meaning open to carnal choice but then to forcefully set it within the bounds of the world in a precise but corrupt place.

The Enlightenment established the pattern for all later attempts: the goal of hermeneutics was the author’s intent. It is not difficult to see that the “intent of the author” is not beholden to a certain author or a certain intent. You supply it, and since it applies to anyone it was accordingly never about the intent of the author of the revelation who is God, and certainly not the historical and revealed Messiah. It means whoever is writing the book. The author is James, Isaiah, and Luke. This forces discussion of revelation impediments as sources of meaning rather than revelation itself, becoming only people speaking as the author, and then if people under a cause of inspiration that can degrade into autosuggestion or hallucination, confused again by time, culture and language.

Now, the author is not important, only the self-actualization of the text as it serves the emotions of the reader.

“In short, a true hermeneutics was rendered impossible by an approach that failed to let the text speak for itself. The hermeneutical switch from the text to the individual resulted from a switch of focus from the accessibility of the text (in terms of a method for interpreting a text) to inquiry into the structure of understanding itself. The focus of interest has thus shifted from the text to the self, and the significance of this shift is still being explored. The result is that the reader is. now seen as the creator of meaning rather than the text, and the act of “coming to understanding” has become an individual self-discovery, more than a process of decoding textual meaning. The author is now seen as entirely removed from the text or the discovery of meaning.” (Hermeneutical Spiral, p. 467).

Osbourne is dead on, but what our “conservative” divines are not understanding is that a solution to radical subjectivism should not have been “let the text speak for itself.” Please don’t misunderstand, I am not saying that the rule of letting the text speak for itself is not true. That is, in fact, my number-one rule. I am saying that we are allowing a prosaic rule stripped of the fundamental biblical context to pretend its competency to authoritatively drive a discussion about the meaning of metaphysical events. Those events are the nexus of meaning, not ideas of any kind, especially supernaturally gutted ones.

This not to say that the text should not be left to speak for itself, and it does not mean that the true meaning should not be understood and applied personally. We must affirm both. It means that “let the text speak for itself” contains many self-defeating choices as to what the text is and how it speaks. Because none of them are necessarily implied in the innocuous idea “let the text speak for itself,” it’s a certainty that the ultimate nature and biblical source of “text” and the ultimate nature of “speak” as it was originally understood could be destroyed by this rule. It has to be “let the prophetic revelation of Messiah speak for itself” because that contains and forces the incorrigible supernatural phenomena of history in the cause of God’s promise and the effect of Christ’s fulfillment of that promise as the one aim of a hermeneutics of God, not man.

You see that we are trying to imitate science here. You can’t do that with Christian metaphysics because our metaphysical investigations and discoveries are dependent upon the reality of an alien artifact, entirely foreign to this world, in which all meaning pertaining to ultimate things is contained. If you don’t believe it you can’t be called a Christian in any sense, and to be Christian means that the prophetic of the Messiah is where the faith is described, delivered and clarified.

Christian Hermeneutics is far from a matter of illumination from reason, a process or feeling, which are human-insular. Since it does not naturally belong here it is possible to closet it, deny it’s real, ignore it, store it somewhere hidden, put it behind a glass display case or lose it entirely. You can’t lose matter, mind, sensibility, reason, Devils Tower or Sirius B. If you don’t constantly use messianic prophecy as your lens to meaning and refer to it in your key ideas, Christian meaning will be the equivalents of matter, mind, sensibility, reason and the Devils Tower. This is the first rule of Christian Hermeneutics, not “let the text speak for itself” or “what does this verse mean to me?” or “reader response,” or “the intent of the author.”

Hermeneutics, to one degree or another, is, and rightly so, attempting to attack the perceived problem of subject and object in the search for meaning in a text. Subject gets in the way or there is too much of an objective bias that misses the reader. The problem, we will see, is solved in the agreement between an objective supernatural phenomenon of scripture that penetrates a supernatural locus within man designed by God to do nothing more than accept and process it according to its rules, which are not necessarily fully understood.

The identification of this object has been lost, and therefore such methods and schools are formed and employed. There is no need for any of them, and, quite hidden to us, they destroy Christian meaning instead of bringing it out. The apostolic period never found the need to establish a definition of school of hermeneutics and we should stop and reflect on why this was as a response to an original understanding of the Word of God, instead of looking at that period as an ignorant and primitive state that was improved only by modern, effectively anti-supernatural hermeneutics.

Please look at these articles:

What is the Word of God?: A Prophetic Think Tank

Christ and the Noun Norming of Transcendence: Passing by Nehushtan

Matthew 5 and the Adultery of the Heart: Passing by Nehushtan

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